Three years ago, Andrew Stockwell had his hiring routine down to a science.
As head of people for the software-buying company Vendr, Stockwell posted a listing, waited a few days, and then reviewed a few dozen applications—up to 100, if he was lucky. Recruiters identified other potential candidates, adding a few more applicants to the mix. Stockwell read résumés, conducted interviews, and passed along sterling candidates to hiring managers.
“It was really about finding that great talent, sussing out that talent, speaking with that talent, and identifying the best possible people,” Stockwell tells WIRED.
Sometime in the last year or so, Stockwell says, everything changed. The process started off the same way, but within a day or two, Stockwell wasn’t looking at 100 candidates. Instead, he was flooded with hundreds of applications. Sometimes, the incoming topped a thousand. A good chunk were “total bogus,” Stockwell says—fake candidates. Many more appeared to have been written using artificial intelligence, stretching the truth and making it difficult to distinguish one applicant from another. The sheer quantity was overwhelming. Stockwell says he found himself “paying my talent-acquisition professionals—who are high-paid, high-quality individuals—just to look through applications all day long.”
Stockwell is one of many recruitment professionals who believe looking for a job is fundamentally broken. In 2026, job hunting has become as easy as online shopping: AI can crank out tailored résumés and cover letters in seconds. Browser extensions can autofill applications, no human necessary. LinkedIn serves users dozens of jobs a day, many with the option to apply with “just a few clicks.”
“A year ago, every recruiter would tell me: We want to make it as easy as possible to apply for jobs,” offering candidates a “seamless experience,” Ophir Samson, the head of voice AI for Greenhouse, tells WIRED. Samson joined the recruiting platform earlier this year, when it acquired his startup, which used AI to conduct job interviews. “What they got was 2,000 applicants in 24 hours for a job. That is a shitty experience for everyone.”
Good applicants can’t stand out, while bad candidates slip through the cracks. Recruiters, Samson says, face the tortuous task of judging thousands of candidates, every single day. Instead of taking the time to search LinkedIn for dream employees, they spend hours in applicant tracking systems, tweaking filters to try to determine whose applications are worth a 30-second skim.
Now, recruiters are telling Samson, “actually, we kind of want friction,” he says. “The friction is good. We want to make it harder.”
The desire to remove pain points in the application process makes sense: If the highest number of qualified candidates apply for a role, it stands to reason that a company can maximize the chances of finding the best possible fit. So for years, recruiters have posted on job boards and LinkedIn; they signed up for LinkedIn’s “Easy Apply” feature; they promised candidates a “one-click” application process. Post-pandemic, recruiters’ efforts to simplify the process went into superdrive, as employers struggled to fill open roles.
“Everyone was job hopping, because you literally could have three offers in an afternoon,” Jane Curran, the chief transformation officer at real estate giant JLL, tells WIRED. Now, “it is the polar opposite.”
Openings peaked at a record 12.3 million in March 2022, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, followed by two years of decline. Since mid-2024, openings have hovered at around 7 million, give or take 500,000.
But as the number of job openings contracted, the barriers to entry for applying declined even further. AI—which entered the mainstream in late 2022 with the public release of ChatGPT—allows applicants to rewrite résumés and track new postings almost instantaneously. Companies like JobAssist, Sonara, and Ladder’s Apply4Me promise applicants that their technology will handle all the busy work of applying for jobs, by submitting “10x as many applications with less effort than one manual application.” If you wanted to, you could apply for dozens of jobs a day.
This formula has led to ballooning candidate pools and laborious hiring processes. LinkedIn tells WIRED that submissions per applicant on the platform are up 46 percent compared to February 2020. Since the launch of ChatGPT, applications are up 22 percent. The explosive number of applications led to LinkedIn adding limits to cut back on automated and low-quality applications. This month, the platform is rolling out a feature that informs (seemingly) underqualified applicants that they probably aren’t a good fit for a role, and suggests other jobs.
“We’re currently in a place where employers are complaining that they can’t find good people, and people are complaining that they can’t find jobs,” Tessa White, a former HR executive, tells WIRED.
White worked in HR for two decades before leaving corporate America in 2018. During the pandemic, she began posting on TikTok, where she has built a following of 800,000 by sharing advice and commentary on the job market. She believes the current situation is unworkable, and is a result of recruiters’ quest for speed and ease. “Every time we seem to strive for efficiency, we seem to give up quality,” she says.
Recruiters know they have a problem. Sure, an avalanche of résumés is welcome for some roles, such as skilled trades workers, where employer demand consistently exceeds employee supply. But for the typical unemployed white-collar knowledge worker, JLL’s Curran says, there “is not enough churn, not enough jobs coming into the market.” That means recruiters in these industries face a barrage of résumés every time they post a new role.
Many recruiters are turning to AI tools themselves, hoping to wrangle the sea of applications into something more manageable. Companies have used automated applicant tracking systems to screen résumés for at least a decade; now, many are using agents to conduct first-round interviews with candidates.
“We frequently hear from recruiters: They have 1,000 applications, but they know that only 30 of them are serious,” Greenhouse’s Samson says. An AI interview can sort the unserious from the serious, he says, offering recruiters context beyond a résumé.
While Samson says that these AI interviews are not friction for friction’s sake, they have the added bonus of weeding out bots and halfhearted candidates. Curran says she expects some companies to turn to knock-out questions that cut down the application pool via strict criteria. Others might add skills testing earlier in the process.
But White isn’t convinced these changes fix the underlying problem—that the frictionless résumé drop has rendered the first round of the application process essentially worthless. “Employers are having such a hard time hiring people with the current antiquated process,” White says. “Even AI and applicant tracking systems, which sound so high-tech, are an antiquated way to look at people and skill sets.” AI simply does not have the capabilities, she says, to accurately judge someone’s potential.
“I definitely think recruiting and the way we do it is due for a massive overhaul,” White says. “And I don’t even know that I have the right answers.”
The deluge of applications has increased recruiters’ reliance on referrals and internal hires. While these human-to-human connections have always been important, today, some see them as the only ways to circumvent the glut of applications. Stockwell believes this benefits people whose backgrounds align with existing employees’, which isn’t conducive to a diverse workforce. “The whole thing is a big mess,” he says.
Stockwell is now dealing with the mess from the other side of the application portal. In February, he left Vendr, and is now on the job hunt. He treats the search like a job, “pounding the pavement” and attending in-person networking events. He knows that without a personal connection the chance of actually getting an interview is close to zilch. When he applies to jobs online, he estimates it only leads to a phone interview less than 2 percent of the time.
“I’m biased, of course, about my own capabilities,” Stockwell says. “But companies are missing out on fantastic talent.”
